dinner parties are fun

on sunday night, we decided we were going to have people over for dinner, but the only people who could come were melissa and kim/john, but kim and john were already having people over for strombolis, so they invited the whole lot of us over to kim's. it was great. the guests included the aforementioned people as well as jeremy and joan, kim's vet school friend. we got there and feasted on pita points with spinach/artichoke hummus, garlic hummus, and kim's famous herbed cheese with marinara dip - all very tasty! andrew and i provided wine with selections of the biltmore sangiovese and a yellowtail shiraz. both were heartily enjoyed mostly before the actual dinner hit the table. for dinner, we enjoyed salad and the ham/pepperoni/onion/green pepper/mushroom strombolis care of john. they were yummy! i don't particularly like all that meat in my pizza type stuff, but i enjoyed them anyway. melissa made her famous seven-layer cookies, and many of those were eaten before dinner as well. i love food!

then we hung out and talked and played video games for a few hours before heading home. it was finally cold for the first time this year! i guess i'm kinda glad we didn't make it out camping. so monday morning we woke up, and it felt like a sunday. in fact, for the majority of the day, i really thought it was a sunday. we ran a few errands at the vet and the grocery store, and we picked up a mountain of food for last night. since a lot of people couldn't make it sunday, we had several others over last night for a mini-dinner party of our own. we bought the ingredients for madeira chicken, asparagus, butternut squash, couscous, and a cake (well not so much the ingredients for the cake, we just bought the cake). we also picked up a rose wine to taste with the meal. it was gross, or at least not what i was hoping for when i picked it out. and whenever i've made madeira chicken before, i've used the whole foods madeira wine sauce... but this time, there was apparently no such thing at whole foods. we called and andrew went to several of them in search of this sauce, which i know existed (and was very tasty!), but none could be found, so it was left to me to MAKE a madeira wine sauce - scary.

i used all the ingredients the recipe told me to, and i cooked it for as long as it told me to... and it looked like white water. now every madeira sauce i've had has looked like brown glaze, so i kept cooking it and we added some thickening agents, and i kept cooking it... and kept cooking it... and finally gave up. i decided to saute some of it with the mushrooms, and that started to look more like the right color and texture. and i marinated the chicken in the rest of it, which i think added to the chicken's flavor, and then i dumped it all together in the dutch oven and cooked it. apparently that was key because i got raving reviews, especially about the mushrooms - from people who don't like mushrooms. that was exciting.

so before we ate, we enjoyed several wines (some care of jackie) and cheese and spread-y stuff, also care of jackie. it was great. once lindsay and james got here, we dove into the food. unfortunately, i had put the asparagus, that had been sauteed earlier, into the oven to warm... and it got all nasty and stringy. but that was the only pitfall, everything else was very tasty!

to end the evening we enjoyed a "raspberry chocolate fetish cake" from whole foods that was delicious and very rich. the whole night was filled with great conversation, and it was nice to see lindsay for the first time in a while. i guess that's about all - now it's off for a day of working at oberlin! yay for oberlin, boo for working during my vacation.

(perhaps pictures to come later)